Born to Run js-7

by James Grippando

  “Fire away,” said Agent Madera.

  “Let’s start with the reason you were reassigned to Phil’s security detail.”

  “That woman-Chloe Sparks-was unstable. After she was fired for drug possession, we tagged her as a potential stalker.”

  The president interrupted, as if propelled to fill in the blanks. “Frank was seen as the best man to contain the threat.”

  “That sounds like a crock,” said Harry.

  “What did you just say?”

  “Pardon my tone,” said Harry, “but I need you to stop talking to me as if I were an idiot. I’ve heard enough to know that it had less to do with stalking and more to do with the vice president’s libido.”

  The president’s expression soured, but Harry’s gaze was cutting across the room like a laser beam, breaking down the wall of misinformation.

  “All right,” said the president. “Phil was being Phil. Chloe Sparks made overtures to him-we called it stalking-but Phil didn’t see her advances as, shall we say, unwelcome as we did. That’s why Frank was reassigned to the vice president’s detail. To stop Phil from meeting with her.”

  “I knew Phil as well as you did,” said Harry. “Once he made up his mind, no one could stop him from doing what he wanted to do. Not even the president.”

  There was silence in the room, Harry’s words wrapping around the president like the coldest of realities.

  “I want the truth,” said Harry, “or I’m withdrawing my name from consideration.”

  “Harry, come on now.”

  “I mean it,” said Harry. “The truth about Chloe Sparks. Or I’m out.”

  He didn’t appear to be bluffing. The president blinked.

  “All right,” he said with a sigh. “Frank, tell him.”

  “Sir?” he said, incredulous.

  “You heard me. Tell the governor why you were reassigned to Vice President Grayson.”

  Agent Madera seemed uncomfortable with the task, but he never refused a direct order from the president-at least not in front of a third party. “It was my job to make sure that whatever the vice president did and however he did it, national security interests would not be compromised.”

  “That’s a nice spin,” said Harry. “But what does it mean?”

  The president said, “You said it yourself, Harry. I couldn’t stop Phil. But if we left it up to the vice president to pursue her, he was bound to end up like every other man who cheats on his wife. He’d get caught, eventually.”

  Harry said, “So Agent Madera became the Secret Service facilitator-like JFK and Marilyn Monroe?”

  “When it comes to sex,” the president said dryly, “few things are without precedent in Washington.”

  “Are you telling me that Chloe Sparks was with Phil Grayson on the night of his death?”

  The Secret Service agent took the question, even though it was directed to the president. “The good news is that the answer to that question is no.”

  “Then why was he pumped full of ED medication?”

  “How did you know that?”

  “Jack told me,” said Harry.

  “Your son has been busy, I see.”

  “He has it on good authority that the toxicology report is going to show that Vice President Grayson was full of ED medication at the time of his death. So I want the whole truth: Was she with him in Florida?”

  The president looked at his Secret Service agent and said, “Frank, the whole truth, for our distinguished nominee.”

  “Yes, sir,” he said. “She was supposed to come, but it didn’t work out. Too much media surrounding the vice president’s visit to Florida, too many guests around who might see something they shouldn’t see.”

  “But he took the ED medication anyway?” said Harry.

  “It was a time-released dosage, good for thirty-six hours. I presume he wanted to be ready whenever she showed up.”

  Harry fell quiet again, but he seemed satisfied that he was finally getting the straight dope.

  “So, how do we deal with this toxicology report?” he said.

  “Fortunately,” said the president, “the medical examiner doesn’t plan to release it for another week.”

  “It will leak before then. We need a plan.”

  The president smiled. “I like the way you say we.”

  “I have no choice,” said Harry. “The media will undoubtedly feast on this. Since I was with the vice president on the night he died, I am going to spend a lot of time answering questions about something that has very little to do with my qualifications to be vice president.”

  “Are you okay with that?”

  Harry paused, thinking. It didn’t take long. “Here’s the way I see it. I can decline the nomination and be accused of having arranged for Phil to come to Florida and bed his former White House intern. Or I can accept the nomination, and be accused of the very same thing.”

  “You’re a smart man, Harry Swyteck.”

  “Or a fool for having gotten back into this game.”

  “Do I take that to mean that you’re in for the long haul?”

  “Only if you can assure me that putting Agent Madera on the vice president was for national security reasons, as you said, and not simply to cover up a potential scandal.”

  “You have my word on that.”

  The two men looked each other in the eye, and the president searched for that certain body language that said lies were unacceptable-unless they were believable.

  “Then I’m still in,” said Harry. “With one caveat.”

  “Name it.”

  Harry turned deadly serious. “No more ticking time bombs like Chloe Sparks. No more secrets of any kind. Or not even Agent Madera will be able to stop me from kicking your ass.”

  The president smiled, even though Harry didn’t.

  “Fair enough, my friend.”

  They shook on it, the president applying his famous double touch, shaking with his right hand while applying his left to Harry’s right shoulder.

  The president said, “While we’re on the subject of security, I feel we should talk more about this anonymous e-mail Jack received. You still seem concerned about that.”

  “Anyone who claims to have the power to bring down the president sounds like a nut case to me,” said Harry. “With my son on the front line, concern is probably a good word.”

  “I can understand that. I know the FBI has given you assurances about Jack’s safety, but in the world of personal protection, I trust no one more than Frank. I’d like to arrange for him to be assigned to you.”

  “I appreciate the gesture. But that’s not really necessary.”

  “I insist. He has experience on the vice presidential side of things with Phil, so it’s an easy transition. We’ll make the reassignment first thing in the morning.” The president took one last swallow of coffee. “You look tired, Harry. Go to bed.”

  “I am beat. Thank you, sir.”

  Harry said good night to both the president and the new special agent in charge of vice presidential protection, and then he left through the north door. Agent Madera remained behind with the president. Neither seemed eager to be the first to speak, each waiting for the other’s reaction.

  “You told him too much,” said Madera.

  “He’ll be fine. Harry Swyteck wants to be vice president in a bad way. Much more than he lets on. Now that he’s in the loop about Chloe Sparks and Phil Grayson, he has no choice but to toe the line.”

  “You trust him that much?”

  “I do now that you’re on his security detail.”

  “Nice touch, the way you couched it in terms of personal safety.”

  “I’m sure he sees through that. The only question is how far he can see.”

  President Keyes rose and stepped toward the window. Surrounding city lights gave the south lawn a warm glow on a cold December night. “Do you think…”

  He stopped himself.

  “Do I think what?” said Madera.

  �
��I have this unsettling suspicion about his son.”

  “He does seem a bit too friendly with Paulette Sparks since coming to Washington.”

  “Not to mention Marilyn and Elizabeth Grayson.”

  “All on the heels of that e-mail.”

  The president leaned against the window frame, his back to Agent Madera as he spoke to his reflection in the pane of bullet-resistant glass. “It could be paranoia on my part. But I’m beginning to wonder if Jack has already figured out that Phil Grayson having sex with an intern has absolutely nothing to do with the power to bring down the Keyes administration.”

  “That would be our worst fear,” said Madera.

  He shook his head, speaking in a solemn voice. “You want to know my worst fear, Frank?”

  Agent Madera did not respond.

  President Keyes was a student of history, and in times of stress, snippets of White House history seemed to rise up from the floorboards to haunt him.

  “Did you know that President Garfield was brought to this very room after he was shot in the summer of 1881?”

  “Is that what keeps you up at night, assassination?”

  “Of sorts,” he said, turning to face him. “My worst fear is that the entire world is about to know what the Greek knows. And there’s nothing I can do to stop it.”

  Chapter 19

  The Greek was the last customer of the night at Mahoney’s Pub. He walked past the empty booths and pulled up a stool at the Formica-topped bar.

  “What’ll it be, old man?”

  The bartender was young, short, and skinny-the complete opposite of the Greek, who was an imposing figure even when seated.

  “Shot and a beer,” he said.

  The beer was dinner. Or breakfast. Whatever worked at 1:00 A.M. for a guy with a huge problem on his mind and who couldn’t sleep. Alcohol touched his lips only when the back pain flared up-something he’d dealt with for almost fifty years, ever since those thugs had thrown him off an apartment building in Nicosia to watch him splatter like a watermelon. The doctors had told him he was lucky to be alive, lucky not to be paralyzed. They obviously didn’t know Demetri Pappas. Luck had nothing to do with it. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. It was a cliche, but the Greek lived by it. Swimming in the Mediterranean Sea had whipped his body back into shape. A mile a day for over forty years. Then cycling. Seventy miles in a single day had been commonplace in his prime. Finally, he was ready to run. He’d finished eight marathons in his lifetime, and he was determined to run another before he hit seventy. He still smiled at reruns of that old TV show, Ironside. The Greek should have been that guy in the wheelchair. Instead, he was Ironman.

  The bartender set him up. He downed the drinks quickly.

  “’Nother round.”

  The Greek’s brain was buzzing, but he was still thinking clearly. He never let himself drink to the point of intoxication, never did anything to cloud his judgment. Especially when it was decision time.

  Plan A was dead-literally. Chloe Sparks had totally conned him. He should have known that serious money from the Inquiring Star was out of the question when the editor had refused to negotiate and handed him off to a young reporter. Plan B had seemed like a better idea. What politician wouldn’t pay a king’s ransom to launch himself overnight from second-in-command to head of state? It certainly would have worked that way in Cyprus-and not just because Shakespeare had written of such false loyalty in Othello.

  “Here’s to you, Iago,” he said, and then he downed the second round as quickly as it was poured.

  The bartender switched off the glowing neon beer sign in the window. “Closing time, old man.”

  “How about a coffee?”

  “There’s a diner across the street.”

  The Greek grumbled, but he was angrier with himself than anyone. He should have known better than to put his trust in the likes of Jack Swyteck-a lawyer and the son of a politician. Swyteck-what the hell kind of a name was that, anyway? Must have been another one of those hatchet jobs by immigration officials at Ellis Island. The Greek had once known a Jozef Swatek from Galicia. Or was it Prague? Could have been Russia.

  Fucking Russians.

  The Greek tipped back his beer glass and found one more swallow. Plan C would be the charm-as soon as he figured out what it was.

  The bar was empty, and the bartender looked ready to head home. “Twenty-four bucks,” he said.

  The Greek checked his wallet. Four singles. He was twenty dollars short. Two hundred fifty thousand and twenty dollars short, to be exact.

  “You take an IOU here?”

  “This ain’t no charity.”

  “World keeps getting crueler every day, don’t it?”

  The bartender started wiping down the Formica. “Tell me something I don’t know, pal.”

  The Greek snatched the towel, giving the bartender a start.

  “What the hell, old man?”

  With a quickness that belied his age, the Greek brought his hand up from his lap and rested it on the bar top. It was wrapped in the towel.

  “I’m telling you something you don’t know.”

  The bartender glanced uneasily at the towel. “What you got wrapped up in there?”

  “Could be just my hand. Could be my hand holding a bobcat.”

  “A bobcat?”

  The Greek turned deadly serious, working extra hard to speak with no accent. “I mean the Beretta model 21A semiautomatic twenty-two-caliber pistol fully loaded with forty-grain lead, round-nosed, standard-velocity subsonic ammunition. Weighs less than a pound, easily concealed in the palm of a man’s hand. Wrapped in a towel like this one, the muzzle blast is reduced to something less than a cap gun. Much less. On the street, it’s called a bobcat. You didn’t know that, did you?”

  The Greek delivered his patented stare, a penetrating laser that could have burned through men of steel, much less a skinny bartender who looked barely old enough to drink. To most folks, the Greek was another one of those sixty-something-year-old marvels who could have lifted weights with Chuck Norris and out-boxed Sly Stallone. An unlucky few, however, learned why he stayed fit-though it had been a very long time since he’d killed a man over twenty bucks.

  “There’s two hundred dollars in the cash register,” said the bartender, his voice quaking. “Grab it and go.”

  “Don’t shit your pants, okay? This ain’t a robbery. I’m good with the drinks. Just put them on my tab, junior.” Dzunior.

  “Forget about it. They’re on me.”

  The Greek slid off his bar stool. “I’m gonna pay you for the drinks. I got some money coming in.”

  “Sure, whatever. Just be cool and walk your bobcat right on out of here.”

  He started toward the door, but an almost unbearable shooting pain in his right leg brought him to a halt. Sciatica from the L5 vertebra felt as if someone had taken a hot knife and sliced him open from hip to heel. It got that way only when he was under serious stress-and these last two weeks had been as serious as it gets.

  He closed his eyes for a moment, the way his Zen muscular therapist had taught him. She’d given him various techniques, starting with a descriptive name for his pain that would make it seem weaker than his will to defeat it. He tried “Useless Pain in the Ass,” but that was too cumbersome. He settled on “Politico,” a shorter but synonymous term.

  The Greek swallowed the pain and walked out the front door.

  The cold night air cut to the bone, which only exacerbated his back pain. It was possible that the bartender would dial 911, but if he did, so what? As much trouble as the Greek had gotten himself into on the outside, he was probably safer in jail.

  He stopped at the pedestrian crossing on the street corner. A taxi pulled up before he could even get his hand out of his coat pocket to flag him down. It was a van. The side door slid open, and the Greek climbed up into the middle seat.

  “Motel Six,” he said, as he closed the door. “Just outside the Beltway.”

  Th
e driver nodded and pulled away, and before the Greek could react, a leather strap came up and over his head from behind. He grabbed it instinctively, trying to pry it from his neck, and it loosened just enough for him to breathe.

  “Move and you die,” the man said. He was in the luggage area behind the middle seat. His accent was definitely Russian.

  Shit, not again.

  The Greek struggled to speak. “That you, Vlad?”

  “It ain’t your momma.”

  It was definitely Vladimir. He gave the Greek another centimeter of slack on the strap, and the words came easier.

  “I’m no good to you dead,” said the Greek.

  “No damn good alive.”

  “I can’t raise a quarter million dollars overnight.”

  “Should have thought of that before you started skimming from us.”

  The Greek drew a breath. In the old days, a casino manager could pocket ten grand a month from the counting room and the Sicilians would look the other way, almost expecting their local boys to grab a little “walking-around money.” All that changed when the Russians took over Cyprus. Skimming in the classic sense-hiding your own money from the government-was still cool. But hiding money from the Mafiya was almost certain death, if you got caught. And the Greek had been caught red-handed.

  “I’ll double what I owe,” said the Greek. “Five hundred thousand. Give me two weeks.”

  The taxi rounded a corner, and in the rearview mirror the Greek caught a glimpse of the man behind the pistol. He appeared to be smiling.

  “One week,” said Vladimir. “Call it professional courtesy.”

  The taxi stopped, and the Russian leaned closer to whisper into his ear: “If I come back, it won’t be pretty, and it won’t be quick. Half a million in one week. Or you’ll wish to God I’d finished you off tonight.”

  The driver hopped out and opened the door. Vladimir pushed the Greek out into the street, and the taxi sped away as he picked himself up from the pavement. He walked to the curb and cinched up his coat.

  Half a million dollars. In one week. It didn’t seem feasible, not with two strikes named Sparks and Swyteck already against him. At this stage of the game, his only real choice was to go back to Keyes’ people. The Greek had sold his secret way too cheap the first time around anyway. They might pay again if he threatened to go public.